AntPool, a major player in Bitcoin mining, has decided to refund a Bitcoin user who mistakenly paid an 83 BTC transaction fee worth $3.1 million. Following this incident, AntPool temporarily suspended its risk control system and gave the wallet address owner until December 10, 2023, to verify their identity. The user was asked to contact the mining pool to facilitate the refund process.
To facilitate the refund process, the mining company requested the user to prepare a signed message using the private key of the wallet address associated with the transaction, using a signature tool such as Electrum or Bitcoin Core, and send the signed text with the “AntPool” message to the support email address.
The erroneous transaction set a new record in the Bitcoin transaction fee metric, reaching a cost of $3.1 million. The user paid 120,528 times more than the transaction fee required for a transfer of 55.77 BTC, as reported by Mempool.
According to AntPool’s statement, “On November 23, a user sent 83 BTC as a transaction fee. AntPool’s risk control system temporarily froze the transaction fee. Please contact us before December 10, 2023, 08:00 and verify your identity as described below. After the identity verification, AntPool will refund the paid transaction fee.”
This incident is reminiscent of a similar erroneous transaction that occurred in September, where a user paid a transaction fee of $500,000 to transfer only 0.074 BTC. At that time, the mining pool F2Pool received the payment as the valid block-producing Bitcoin mining pool and later refunded the transaction fee to the crypto service provider Paxos.